INCARCERATION AND CREATION: Inmate Jose Polanco waters lettuce outside the greenhouse at county prison on State Road in Northeast Philadelphia. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

"It's hard to believe that anything can come out of something so small," Tarpley says, shaking more seeds out of a white paper pouch into his hand.

The program is linking Tarpley, who works in a greenhouse with four other inmates in the prison system's job-training program, with 21 of the city's community gardens and a network of about 15 food cupboards in neighborhoods like Fairhill, Allegheny West, Poplar and Yorktown. The ultimate goal is to funnel about 7,000 pounds of fresh lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes and other produce to families in each of the next two growing seasons.

"This is a program that's trying to address the issue of food insecurity in the city," says Barbara Solarz, program manager of parks and gardens for Philadelphia Green, the division of the Horticultural Society overseeing the program. "There's a lot of people in this city who don't see fresh produce in their diet. Or if there's anything available, it usually looks pretty pathetic."

Tarpley, wearing a prison-issued orange jumpsuit that doubles as a pair of overalls, says he can relate after being raised in a poor family in Germantown.

"I was one of those people growing up," Tarpley says. "I had to go wait on one of those lines for food."

The last U.S. census showed that more than one-fifth of Philadelphia's residents live under the poverty line, and the city's poorest residents tend to have a limited amount of fresh vegetables in their diet, according to community activists and local food cupboard operators. Full-service supermarkets with large fresh produce sections are scarce in low-income neighborhoods. Even if there are supermarkets, many families on tight budgets shy away from fresh produce, which can be relatively expensive.

"People who lack money can get fatty foods much cheaper than produce," says Martha Buccino, vice president for strategic development at Philabundance, which operates a food distribution network for needy families in the Delaware Valley.

Diets that are short on fresh produce may be behind some chronic health issues that plague impoverished inner-city communities, such as high blood pressure, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes, and diabetes.

"It's pretty clear that poor nutrition—particularly if nutrition doesn't include significant amounts of fruits and vegetables—can be related to poor medical conditions," says Nicolas Stettler, a pediatric nutrition specialist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who studies the link between childhood diet and adult health problems.

In Philadelphia, there have been ongoing efforts to provide a pathway for fresh produce to be distributed to low-income families to help alleviate the problem. Some have been formal, like Philabundance, which takes donations from local supermarkets, food distributors and restaurants and has also connected some community gardens with local food cupboards. Others have forged their own connections, such as a student-run garden at Pollock Elementary School in Northeast Philadelphia that initiated a relationship with a local food cupboard on their own.

However, the organizers of City Harvest say that never before has there been such an extensive and permanent framework set up to link the city's community gardeners with food cupboards that distribute products regularly to low-income families.

It was the staff at the Horticultural Society that developed the program over a four-year period as they tried to devise a program that would attract donors. What emerged was the current plan to use inmates to grow seedlings, community gardeners to raise the plants and a small network of food cupboards organized by the Self-Help and Resource Exchange, a city nonprofit with its own food-aid program, to give needy families a place to pick up the food.

In addition to providing free produce, the goals of the program include teaching people how to cook vegetables they may not be familiar with and giving inmates skills that may lead to work in landscaping or gardening— jobs that convicted felons aren't normally barred from, once they are out of prison.

"The idea was so powerful, we decided it should be tried," says Priscilla Luce, president of the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation, a Philadelphia-based supporter of arts, education and social service programs that is funding City Harvest.

The Greenfield Foundation awarded the Horticultural Society a $250,000 grant in 2005 to fund City Harvest as a two-year pilot project. The money is being used for a variety of purposes, including supplying gardens with soil, paying for the renovation of the prison greenhouse and paying for nutritionists to teach recipients of the produce how to use it.

At the heart of the program are the city's community gardens, which are generally empty or abandoned lots that have been purchased or leased and partitioned into smaller plots that are assigned to and tended by nearby residents. The 21 gardens that have been selected to participate in City Harvest are among about 500 scattered throughout Philadelphia, according to the Horticultural Society. Gardens that were at least three years old were selected for the program, and gardeners had to be enthusiastic.

A NEW LEAF: Lisa Mosca leads a community workshop on how to care for and replant the seedlings that are grown in prison. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

"The City Harvest is a pretty intensive program," says Eileen Gallagher, project manager of Philadelphia Green. "So we really wanted to make sure that the gardeners wanted to do this."

The gardens vary widely in size and in the number of gardeners who work them. Glenwood Green Acres in Philadelphia's Susquehanna neighborhood takes up an entire city block and is home to about 90 gardeners. The Hansberry Garden and Nature Center in Germantown is much smaller, squeezing about 27 plots into a parcel of land about the size of two city lots.

Not all the gardeners in these places are participating, but those who do are reserving part of their plots for the program, or tending to communal plots that have been specially set aside. Those participating say they view their efforts as a natural extension of what they have already been doing for years: donating vegetables they have grown in excess of what they can eat to neighbors or needy families.

"People who garden tend to have some consciousness of waste and the value of food," says Vicki Mehl, president of the Hansberry Garden and Nature Center, which is devoting two of its 27 beds to the project. "All that work you put in, why would you let it rot or go to waste?"

One of the program's more unique elements is how it uses inmates in the county prison system to raise seedlings, which have a better chance than seeds of surviving against weeds and predators. The idea to use inmates arose when somebody at the Horticultural Society remembered there was a greenhouse at the prison system's main complex on State Road in Northeast Philadelphia that had been used for an inmate job-training program. Before funding dried up in the 1990s, it had been used to raise and sell flowers and vegetables.

By using the prison greenhouse, the Horticultural Society could ensure they had a supply of vegetable seedlings early and late in the season when other growers don't offer them. They also thought the prisoners' rehabilitation could potentially be hastened by the act of working to help others.

"It seemed like a win-win for everyone," Solarz says.

To get the prison's piece of the program up and running, the greenhouse was outfitted with a new heating and exhaust system so seedlings could be grown early enough in the year to be ready for the beginning of the spring planting season. A two-acre plot behind the greenhouse has also been prepared so the prisoners can raise their own vegetables for City Harvest.

Participation in the program is limited to six male and six female prisoners who work six-week rotations. There are no preset selection criteria, but administrators say they prefer to place people in the program who they believe are not likely to be released before the course ends and who have not gotten far enough in school to qualify for other jobs, such as computer maintenance. The inmates are slated to work four-hour shifts, men in the morning and women in the afternoon, tending to the seedlings and the garden behind the greenhouse.

For most of the past month, only the male prisoners have been working, logging seven-hour days, mostly devoted to turning what was a weed-covered plot behind the greenhouse into a workable garden with raised planting beds. The work hasn't been easy, a surprise for some of the participants who have never gardened before.

"I thought you would just put it in the ground and it grows," says Tarpley, who besides planting tomato seeds has helped clear the back garden. "I leave here tired every day. It works every muscle in your body. Your arms, your legs, your back."

But as the initial group of male prisoners was beginning to grow its first round of seedlings and plant vegetables in the raised beds behind the greenhouse, the idea that they were engaged in work designed to help others was beginning to take root among some. That included Jose Polanco, a 32-year-old father of one from Camden, who is serving up to 23 months for transporting drugs.

"It's amazing just knowing that we are giving back something, with all that we took from society," Polanco says, as he takes a break from pulling rocks from the path of a rototiller a fellow inmate is using to break up soil. "It's been my inspiration to come out here and feed somebody."

It's exactly for that reason that prison administrators say they agreed to be a part of City Harvest. Although the prison's State Road complex already had job-training workshops in a variety of skills—including carpentry, computer repair and building maintenance—none offered prisoners the opportunity to give something directly back to communities they may have harmed.

"I thought this was something really different," says Johanne Steigerwald, director of the JOBS Project for restorative and transitional services of the Philadelphia prison system. "They get the satisfaction of seeing something created by their hand and they can physically see something change, and, hopefully, I can see something spiritually change in them."

There are no current plans to introduce the inmates to those who will be benefiting from their work. A harvest party is in the works for the end of the growing season, and they may meet some community gardeners during presentations given by the Horticultural Society.

But just because the prisoners don't see those they are helping doesn't mean they aren't in their mind.

GROWTH POTENTIAL: An inmate carefully places one cherry tomato seed in each dirt cube. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

"When all is said and done I get three square meals a day," says Robert Tyska, a 36-year-old from Roxborough who is serving up to 23 months for burglary. "But there's people out there who don't have that."

Over the next several hours, Mehl and a handful of other gardeners will put those seedlings into two of the 5-by-10-foot plots that a child of one of the gardeners has recently weeded. They will dig a trench for the potatoes, mounding the earth on top to give the roots room to grow, and then plant the lettuce and collards close enough together so that when they grow the leaves will meet and crowd out the weeds by shading the ground below.

Mehl says she isn't bothered by the day's work, or the hour or two a month she will have to spend maintaining the plants as they grow. She is looking forward to sharing the food that makes her mouth water when she plants it.

"When you eat something you just picked, you know you're eating food that was really just alive," Mehl explains. "I think it's a wonderful thing to be able to share that with people who are in need."

The first round of plantings, put in the ground about two weeks before, were of vegetables that do well in the cold and damp of a typical Philadelphia spring, like collard greens, broccoli, potatoes, mustard greens and kale. Instructors from the Horticultural Society traveled to four of the participating gardens to give participating gardeners demonstrations on cold-weather growing techniques. They showed the volunteers how to plant potatoes and the proper way of distributing seedlings bought from a local greenhouse (the renovation of the prison greenhouse wasn't finished in time for this first round). Some seeds for root crops that don't transplant well, such as carrots and beets, were also distributed. Later in the year, plants that thrive in the summer heat, like tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, will be distributed.

The first harvest is expected some time around the end of May, including lettuce and snap peas. The arrangements for delivering the produce, about once a week early on in the season and twice a week during the summer, are still being worked out between the gardeners and the food cupboards they are assigned to. Some food cupboards have vehicles available to pick up what is harvested, others will have to rely on the gardeners for delivery.

City Harvest is trying to ensure that all of the vegetables go to use, so plans call for a nutritionist to be on hand at the food cupboards once a month to teach people how to use items that they may be unfamiliar with because they are not a regular part of their diet.

"We take a lot of things for granted in this country," says Steveanna Wynn, executive director of the Self-Help and Resource Exchange. "If you give people [vegetables] they haven't had a lot of, you need to provide them with education about the healthiest and best way to prepare them."

Because of the response that they have been getting from gardeners, enthusiasm is running high among the program's organizers that it will succeed and may potentially be expanded in upcoming years. And hopes are firmly in place that if it is successful, it could make a difference well beyond the city's borders.

"You have community gardens that exist in a lot of places and you have communities in need in major cities," says the Greenfield Foundation's Luce. "So you say to yourself, "What if we increase the output from these community gardens to make produce readily available in poor neighborhoods in other cities?'"